Rainy-Day Toys and the Joy of Coloring

On rainy days and during the winter we played in the living room and drove Mom crazy with our fighting. I had an Erector set with an electric motor. (I built a Ferris wheel, once.) I had a wood-burning kit that made that wonderfully pleasing aroma of burning cedar wood, a crystal set, that I could sometimes hear faint music on, if I tweaked the whisker on the crystal just so. Once, I learned to paint figurines, which taught me about having the patience to do things right. Bob and I had a set of kid’s boxing gloves, which came out of the box once that I know of because we refused to hit each other, to Dad’s great disappointment. At one point, Bob and I shared a small electric train, which ran on a small set of oval tracks and had a smokestack that you put burning pellets into to create smoke. I spent many mindless hours building little houses with Lincoln Logs to place around the tracks. In the early days, I remember making comic books by cutting out newspaper comic strips and pasting them over old newspaper pages with homemade flour and water paste. I never liked board games much. Too many rules and they took too long, but I did like playing Chinese Checkers with Grampa. Barbara always begged me to make paper cootie catchers for her as well as little square paper balloons made by folding a piece of paper a certain way, then blowing it up through a little hole. My best distraction, by far, was coloring, which, no other way to put it, I adored. Did I color inside or outside of the lines, you’d like to know? If you don’t remember, none of your business, Diana.